Audiard’s direction is engaging, especially his choice to portray one of the most beautiful and romantic cities in the world as a place defined by stark, concrete slabs of apartments and high-rises. But the film never quite lands on anything profound about how this generation lives.

It’s all entertaining enough, in a shaggy way. But if the director can’t stay focused on his own subject, how are we expected to do so?

Electric Dreams can be trusted to provide some idle amusement, particularly from "users" cautious enough to keep both their demands and levels of resistance set at low-to-modest -- probably the ideal setting for summer moviegoing in general, come to think of it.

The film’s title is apt: Gregory was one of a kind. But despite the film’s argument that its subject’s activism was part and parcel of his comedy, and not an afterthought, it’s the jokes that are given short shrift here. One wishes there might have been room for a few more of them.

There is no narration. There are no interviews. Just rote, monotonous activity — a recipe for repetitive stress injury — and the occasional fly-on-the -wall conversation on which we are allowed to briefly eavesdrop between several representatives of what Ascension suggests is as a nation of strivers, with hearts set on achieving what might be called the new Chinese Dream: wealth and success, in the world’s second largest economy.

On the one hand, Beasts is a refreshing departure from the Michael Bay era: a sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes incoherent CGI fight fest structured around a story of family, found and otherwise, and starring a diverse cast. But it’s still, despite a few mildly grown-up jokes, a quintessential Transformers film in one inescapable way. It should come with a different sort of content advisory: No one over 21 admitted without their inner child.

It's a lovely film, but a little inert. It reaches its high point with glorious close-ups of the children. From there, it's all downhill.

It manages to keep you going until the end and delivers the appropriate payoffs as a generic-brand thriller.

Between Two Worlds is freshest when it emphasizes its documentary-like qualities, such as the brief inserts of everyday scenes and locales shot by Philippe Lagnier without any guidance from the director. Less effective are traditional movie elements like Mathieu Lamboley’s score, which flirts too openly with Philip Glass’s style.

Though the script is predictable, it's not too clumsy.

Though there’s no reinvention of the genre here, Louder’s mesmerizing mouse proves more than a match for the assembled tomcats — all exuding machismo — with whom she must deal.

Even a character as sincere and innocently wise as Marcel isn’t above fan service, even if it means taking a sweetly captivating idea an inch too far.

Sundown is at its most engrossing as an individual portrait, even if its inscrutable subject is a person to whom virtually no (sane) viewer will relate. Roth is still a great and mesmerizing actor, even when he’s drifting, vacantly, through a hellscape.

Fortunately, Ahmed (an Oscar nominee for last year’s Sound of Metal and more recently seen in the niche Mogul Mowgli) delivers another one of his reliably watchable performances.

Although the pacing of the film — written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel (“What Maisie Knew”), from a story co-written with David Spreter — can be as slow as the clouds over Big Sky Country, the flawed young characters grow on you, their troubles gradually becoming as mythic as the landscape that surrounds them.

What turns out to be the most moving and meaningful thing about the film isn’t the song at its center, but the work ethic of a man who might have disappeared from the public eye for years at a time but never stopped sweating every word.

Cousteau is a thorough if somewhat by-the-book profile of a pioneer in the field of marine ecology and an activist for better environmental stewardship.

Co-directed by siblings and faith-based filmmakers Andrew and John Erwin, this down-the-middle crowd pleaser ultimately makes for a rousing enough portrayal of against-the-odds fortitude, pad-crunching gridiron action and good old-fashioned Midwestern decency.

It’s all meticulously conceived and impressively staged, but becomes repetitive and monotonous, devolving for anyone not completely steeped in the “Dune” universe into a hazy orange-and-ocher soup of dust, smoke, flames and sand.

A farce founded on a mix-up at a sperm bank, Made in America is a simplistic but amiable dip in the nation's multicultural fondue pot.

Despite a story line that covers such fraught historical events as 9/11 and the Iraq War, the movie is too tidy to ever really feel like a living, breathing thing.

The trick is to make the already ridiculous completely outrageous. Sometimes the family succeeds, like in Keenen Ivory Wayans's 1988 spoof of '70s films I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. Sometimes they fail, like in the waning days of the Fox television series In Living Color. In this movie, they succeed, for the most part.

A mixture of well-researched historical fact and pure fiction, “Munich: The Edge of War” is a smart and entertaining thriller that suffers from just one thing: We all know how it ends.

What this movie could use a little more of is the rigor and self-discipline to pull off all the imagination and originality in a way that does more than leave you gobsmacked.

Blue Beetle, the next chapter in the DC Comics-inspired universe that tells the origin story of a not particularly well-known character, is in several ways refreshingly new. It is also, for a few other reasons, tediously familiar.

Uneven, ambiguous and unnerving, “Sharp Stick” undoubtedly has a point to make. What that is, precisely, might be subject to debate.

True to form for the horror-loving filmmaker behind Oscar winners “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water,” this is a dark affair, despite the occasional song. And yes, it’s a musical.

It’s a yarn that’s made for a great storyteller, with thrills and chills to burn. But the way Tulis spins the thread is wonkier and clunkier than it could, or should, be.

For the most part, 2nd Chance is right on target. But in the end, its aim isn’t quite true.

The film follows two remarkable men in New Delhi: Mohammad Saud and his older brother Nadeem Shehzad, former bodybuilders who used their scientific curiosity, compassion and knowledge of human musculature to figure out how to care for sick and injured birds.

The Adam Project isn’t especially smart, but it does leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling. Its science grade is only passing, but its emotional IQ is above average.

By lovingly examining these dishes’ cultural underpinnings, Hawk serves up an insightful introduction to a food scene at the cross-section of political strife and culinary excellence — not a full meal, exactly, but an enticing appetizer.

The framing device of the conversation between Henry and Celia, which includes a bit of flirtation, necessitates a certain ennui, though director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe”) does his level best to open up the claustrophobic setting with frequent jaunts to other times and locales. Come to think of it, there’s an air of a tennis match to the proceedings of All the Old Knives, with its two protagonists playing a mental game of volley and return, as it were.

In The Automat, Hurwitz and writer Michael Levine trace the rise and fall of Horn & Hardart, illuminating not just a surprisingly compelling corporate history, but a facet of American culture that feels both brimmingly optimistic and thoroughly extinct.

Ultimately, it is, like its conflicted hero, sweet and likable, and you wish it well.

Top it off with Pinaud’s final dedication, and The Rose Maker turns into a film that wears its emotions lightly but generously, like dew on a blush-colored petal.

It’s intentionally chaotic and, now and again, surprisingly funny.

The low-key music documentary “Anonymous Club” — ostensibly a portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett — kind of feels like a movie about someone who doesn’t really want to be in a movie.

Memory is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind.

Despite its broad comedy, typical of “Dukes of Hazzard” director Jay Chandrasekhar, the film has some tender and wise moments. And even if you don’t get all the ethnic jokes, there’s plenty of family drama that anybody will recognize, no matter their background.

Behind all the gore-splattered walls and domestic rancor lies a sweet-and-sour bedtime story of good triumphing over evil. That said, please leave the kids at home.

The screenplay is thoughtful and nuanced, and Epps’s performance anchors the narrative with a solid, unfussy portrayal of ethical indecision, even if the third act detours into more melodramatic territory.

Gustavo Dudamel’s transfixing talent is obvious throughout the documentary ¡Viva Maestro!, a compelling but incomplete look at the prodigious Venezuelan conductor.

"Eat the rich” might be a popular theme this movie season, but The Menu takes the idea to extremes that finally overpower the palate.

Madame Web is no blockbuster, but in its own quiet way, it manages to break down a few barriers.

The movie’s climactic sequence is less expected, and a bit messier than the other episodes. It’s powerful because it effectively evokes the chaos and cost of war. Most of the rest of Devotion just apes clunky old war movies.

Like Charles himself (and maybe Brian, too), it’s an odd hodgepodge of a story: a sweet, eccentric misfit, just waiting for someone to find it, and love it, despite its flaws.

The artistry is enough to keep children and adults watching. It may help that Mario gains power by eating mushrooms — a good message about healthy eating, on the one hand, yet one with an obvious psychedelic resonance at the same time.

The Silent Twins doesn’t try to explain its protagonists’ affliction, but the movie does express its crushing sadness.

On some level, Chevalier understands that the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was the bad old days. Yet it just can’t help but make them look really good.

Still, for all its attractively appointed torpor, Corsage offers a provocative retort to the fetishistic depictions of Elisabeth that have become commodified in Austria over the past 125 years. It tears open the candy box to reveal something poisonous at its center.

It’s a fever dream in which the past and present are confused, along with plant and animal, the living and the dead, and, ultimately, the meaning of this troubled vision.

NASA aficionados and connoisseurs of space exploration are the groups most likely to get a kick out of Good Night Oppy, a warmly charming, if far from essential, documentary that takes a look back at the robotic Martian rover Opportunity.

This lack of generosity toward the supporting players is one of the movie’s major weaknesses. The other is that the episodic story leads to no significant discovery, either narrative or psychological.

The music energizes this often slow-moving film, even if it isn’t potent enough to bring its protagonist to life. Lucas’s bulky camera has, in its way, as much personality as its owner.

The shaggy but ultimately satisfying installment, set six decades before the four movies starring Jennifer Lawrence, carves out its own identity by leaning into its subtitle. If music is food for the soul, “Songbirds & Snakes” serves its tunes with a heaping side of venom.

Ultimately, “Loving Highsmith” provides a valuable addition to the larger record of the author’s enigmatic life, rather than a comprehensive chronicle itself. Which might be altogether fitting for a woman who always seemed to prefer to remain just out of reach.

Director Marc Levin's shaky, hand-held camera lends "Slam" an unvarnished, documentary feel. The script – credited not only to Levin, Bonz Malone and Richard Stratton, but to acclaimed performance poets Sohn and Williams – is dense and difficult.

The actresses work hard to give spark to some of the predictable scenes and dialogue in the screenplay by Kate Lanier and Takashi Bufford. Their fine work eclipses the fact that the film gives us very little information about most of them.

It’s certainly a movie nobody asked for, as Marvel itself acknowledges. But it’s here. And it’s just fine.

In short, it’s a well-done studio horror movie stepping into the oversize shoes of its indie predecessors. It’s not a perfect fit, but by following in the footsteps of the earlier films, it gets the job done.

Yes, it’s handsomely shot, but there are long sequences where little happens. True to life, perhaps, but slow.

Where The Pale Blue Eye succeeds best is in the way it shows how Edgar — yet to become the writer of ghoulish, moody atmosphere and delicious morbidity we remember — got some of his enduring ideas about the coexistence of depravity and beauty. The movie only stumbles when it succumbs, here and there, to the more trivial tropes and jump scares of the contemporary thriller.

As a thriller channeling the deepest anxieties of its era, however, How to Blow Up a Pipeline feels urgently, unmistakably of its time.

Monica is moody, slow-moving and stronger on style than characterization, yet Lysette and Clarkson endow it with feeling. This is a broken-family drama that culminates not with shouted recriminations or smashed crockery, but with baths, massages and gentle kisses.

A carefully wrought character study of a person who lives life with careless abandon.

A Compassionate Spy is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar.

Mufasa at least has the grace to offer audiences a fresh story, but children and parents may find it surprisingly difficult to tell one exquisitely rendered lion from the next.

Cute, kind of clever and oh, so topical. But also problematic.

While “Missing” is just a cheap thriller, one can’t help but wonder whether, in the hands of more inventive filmmakers, the screen time that has come to define personal interaction might find a richer dramatic purpose.

To anyone who feels, at times, so overwhelmed by the drumbeat of climate disaster, economic collapse, crime, mass shooting and terrorism, deadly viruses, and political polarization that it feels as the apocalypse is upon us, Knock at the Cabin will resonate powerfully.

Mostly The Return is about listening to great music getting made by two women representing two generations of country music — Carlile is 41 — who genuinely seem to respect each other, and who have obvious talent.

Anton conveys a deep well of unrequited longing that is so powerful, it doesn’t really need storytelling gimmicks.

Working together for the first time since 2004’s “Finding Neverland,” director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Magee have reimagined Holm’s vision by scaling back the cynicism, softening the central character’s tragic backstory and dulling the black comedy. Yet it’s Hanks’s performance that sets this Hollywood remake apart from the original.

Manzoor has created a world that feels at once very real — multicultural London, a blend of modernity and tradition — and very, very unreal. The story is a sci-fi and kung fu stew, with a mad-professor plotline that’s more than a little hard to swallow. Fortunately, the candy-colored sweetness of the sauce — a feminist story that is at heart about sibling love — makes all the hoo-hah go down a little easier.

It's an exhaustive, and exhilarating, document of an overwhelming lifestyle.

For fans of wildlife documentaries, Wildcat is at least as good as, say, a rerun of “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” (Google it). That is to say: It’s enjoyable while it lasts but fades from the mind soon after, all except for that little piece of a viewer’s heart that holds out hope that little Keanu — and the people who raised him — will one day find the lives they deserve.

Inside is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

The framing may use the tropes of horror, but the film’s light tone — with jump scares more often used for comedic effect — defuses the tension required to make viewers feel on the verge of snapping.

There is little in the film that offers insight into what makes him tick as a person.

Plane is a shot of adrenaline and fast-paced, brain-free fun.

"Luther” is not without its pleasures, assuming you have the stomach for the kind of theatrical crimes that exist only in filmdom.

All this sporting entertainment turns out to be an unexpectedly mellow affair of the heart, with Bernal completely winning you over.

A film that is by turns darkly comic and disturbing, both sensations brought into vivid, caustic relief by the film's mesmerizing star.

If Shortcomings falls short in any way — hackneyed plot, halfhearted themes of assimilation and identity — it isn’t due to the two actors who carry the story across the finish line.

Like Sergio’s unusual modus operandi, Radical takes some time to click, its first half as unstructured as Sergio’s classroom. But at about the halfway point, when the kids discover the excitement of learning, it becomes as thrilling as any blockbuster.

On one level, it can be read as a metaphor for grief, kind of like “The Babadook,” which covered the same ground, albeit to greater effect. But by choosing literalness over ambiguity, The Boogeyman doesn’t quite stick the landing like that richly allusive 2014 Australian film did.

On a grand scale, Tetris offers a window into the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, and from that vantage point, it’s actually pretty fascinating. On the smaller stage, it’s a classically heartwarming underdog story — one that involves backroom wheeling and dealing and an 11th-hour escape from thugs that’s straight out of a Cold War espionage film.

She Came to Me exists in between things: airy romance and psychological depth; operatic fantasy and gritty reality; farce and fatalism. Writer-director Rebecca Miller executes that balancing act with lighthearted audacity in a film that aspires, with fitful success, to resurrect the lost art of screwball comedy — with some literal opera thrown in for musical measure.

As it is, The Killer is less a diamond than a piece of good-looking but cheap quartz: all sparkling surface and not much value.

Wild Life is at its best when it focuses on Kris’s path toward renewed purpose after an unspeakable loss. By committing that journey to film, Vasarhelyi and Chin show off an invaluable skill: knowing when a story is worthy of preservation.

The story is a familiar one — a young immigrant fetches up in New York to seek his fortune, only to be buffeted by a bumptious city and cut to the quick by its competitive edge — but Torres reshapes it into something simultaneously more fantastical and far more real.

Ordinary Angels, an uplifting drama inspired by the effort to get a sick girl to a transplant hospital amid a massive 1994 Kentucky snowstorm, poses a challenge to cynics: Even if you could resist another spunky, heartstring-tugging Hilary Swank performance in this overstuffed true tale, who among us can deny the sublime beauty of Jack Reacher’s tears?

Echoing Liam’s review of Sinclair’s work in progress, I’d call the first two acts of the film cleverly constructed, fresh and fascinating, yet marred by a climax and conclusion that are unworthy of what came before.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

Trolls Band Together is a glitter-encrusted variety pack of a movie. Packed with millennial boy-band humor, sibling love and snippets of pop songs, the third film in the Trolls franchise is an explosion of color tailored to a new generation of parents and their Gen Alpha kids.

Where Gran Turismo works best is on the track. Director Neill Blomkamp adds some formalist flourishes to the driving sequences, turning what could have been a monotonous series of races into entertaining and engaging fun.

The otherwise sober-minded film relies heavily on music cues that are sometimes a little too on the nose, as when a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” plays under scenes of Weigel preparing to testify in front of legislators who see gender only as black and white.